‘This is the hill to die on for universities’: Free speech can survive Trump, but not without a fight

Historian David Hollinger connects the history of the 1964 free speech movement in Berkeley, California, to the protest movements and repressive crackdowns on free speech gripping universities today. In this episode of the Marc Steiner Show, co-hosted by Marc Steiner and Michael Fox, Hollinger draws on his firsthand experience and decades of research to explain the lessons we can learn from 1960s civil rights activists and antiwar organizers about how to defend free speech and academic freedom from extinction today.

Guest:
David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and earlier taught at the University of Michigan, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Oxford. Hollinger’s books include Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017), After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, 2013), Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, 1996), and Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995, 2000, and 2006). He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a former President of the Organization of American Historians.

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

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